By John Moltz
December 29, 2023 2:00 PM PT
This Week in Apple: Tick-tocking into the future
The Apple Watch is back, baby! Meanwhile, Apple is still looking into this whole “AI” thing you might have heard about and what is that I see dimly on the horizon? Is it the first Vision Pro?
A Watch plot that continuously boils
The Apple Watch patent saga is such a rollercoaster ride it’s surprising it hasn’t set off anyone’s crash detection. On Boxing Day, it looked like Apple was out of options.
“Biden administration decides not to overturn Apple Watch sales ban in the US”
But wait! Because in the final seconds of the fourth quarter of 2023, Apple got a [strained football analogy abandoned]!
“U.S. appeals court grants Apple’s request to pause smartwatch import ban”
And just like that, Watches are back on sale at Apple, just in time for… January birthdays, I guess.
Quoted in the piece by NPR is our old pal, Gene “Apple TV set” Munster, who says that if Apple can work around the patent, that will go a long way toward showing it did not violate the patent, depending on a judge’s definition of temporal mechanics.
If you can show you didn’t have to violate a patent, does that mean you ever violated it in the first place? Let us call this Schrödingmunster’s Dependency.
Paying for things? In this economy?
While all of the tech world and investors and Apple’s perpetually disappointed parents are probably wondering why the company is sooo laaaate to the AI arms race, Apple seems more intent on doing it the right way rather than the fast way. The company’s approach to AI appears to be the same as it was throughout 2023: slow and steady doesn’t necessarily win the race, but it stays in the race and also makes sure people don’t get hilariously and catastrophically wrong answers.
Apple has even taken the laughably naive stance that it should [scoff] license the material it trains its AI on! How jejune! How effete! How positively Milhousian!
“Apple Explores A.I. Deals With News Publishers”
According to The New York Times:
The company has discussed multiyear deals worth at least $50 million to train its generative A.I. systems on publishers’ news articles.
While publishers are concerned that Apple’s entreaties are too expansive in their desire to gobble up all of their content, it still stands in rather stark contrast to how other tech companies rushing headlong into AI have approached this. Let’s just thumb through The Times and see if there are any other stories on AI. Hmm. Sportsball. Politics. Ugh. Gross. Ah! Here’s one!
“The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work”
What’s the deal, publishers? You don’t want tech companies to pay you for all-encompassing rights to your content and you don’t want them to just take it without asking! You can’t have it both ways!
Wait.
Vision Pro FOMO
Hey, who likes puns? Well, too bad, because the Vision Pro’s future is getting brighter, there, that’s the pun, I hope you’re happy, you ruined it.
“Vision Pro 2 Rumored to Gain Brighter and More Efficient Displays”
Thank god we no longer have to deal with those dim, inefficient displays on the Vision Pro 1, which hasn’t even been released yet.
But, if the latest rumors are to be believed, we won’t have to wait long to experience its terrible displays.
“Kuo: Vision Pro to hit store shelves in ‘late January or early February’”
Oof, really? That’s a little soon for me. So far I only have… lemme just pretend to check the ol’ bank account here… zero dollars saved up for one.
Whoops, no, sorry, that’s negative dollars. I have negative dollars saved up for a Vision Pro. Forgot to carry the #DIV/0!.
This may seem like financial malpractice but it’s actually part of a clever strategy on my part. See, I’m waiting for the Vision Pro 3. The lenses on those babies… well, let me tell you.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]